I rip open the plastic, press the package to my nose, and suck in the smell of my childhood. It was always a good day when you found Kandy Kakes in your lunch bag. It was about the treat, but it was emotional, too. Finding one of these meant our family was on a good streak. “You guys want one?”
“Not so much.” Kelsey wrinkles her nose. “You have to be from Jersey to like those. I think it’s a rule.”
“Lizzie?”
“All for you,” Lizzie says.
Nobody I know appreciates Kandy Kakes, which is fine by me. I sink my teeth into the sponge cake-y, peanut-buttery goodness, which is of course wrapped in a thick layer of milk chocolate.
When I re-emerge from my dessert bliss, I notice Lizzie’s tearing at something, trying to tear the molded plastic wrap off something rectangular. “What is that?”
“Something else I think might help.”
“What?”
“Hold on.” She claws at the package with her fingernails. “Uhh!”
“Is it a one-woman performance art show depicting wrap rage?” I ask.
She throws the package at me.
I catch it and turn it over. It’s a dart set. “Um, thanks?”
Kelsey has scissors. “Gimme that.” She cuts open the dart set.
“It goes with this.” Lizzie pulls a beat-up paperback from a bag and slaps it onto our coffee table.
Not just any paperback. I grab it. “Excuse me? What is this?”
A rhetorical question. I know what it is. The Max Hilton Playbook: Ten Golden Rules for Landing the Hottest Girl in the Room. Most people call it The Hilton Playbook. It’s Max’s “how to get girls by being an arrogant jerk” guide. It sold millions of copies back when it came out, just a year or two after we graduated from high school.
Max launched his men’s style empire after that. Shoes. Watches. Body spray. Instagram stardom. They’re saying he has a deal for a Netflix show.
I flip the book over.
The entire back cover is Max’s face. It’s one of the more iconic pictures of him; he looks devastatingly handsome, but that’s not what’s special about it—it’s the way the shot captures his gaze, his ability to make you feel like he’s looking right into you and you alone, all sparkling, knowing humor. Like he knows all of your secrets because you trusted him for a little while, and he stomped all over your heart, and he’s just a little too proud of himself.
“Don’t worry, I didn’t buy it new,” Lizzie says, grabbing it from me. “No jerky billionaires were made richer in the acquisition of this book.”
“That’s not my question,” I say. “It’s more like, why is this thing even here?”
Lizzie smiles at Kelsey. “Because plans.”
“Did you ever actually read this thing?” Lizzie asks.
“Hell no,” I say. “Who would read it?”
“Not me.” Lizzie rips the back cover off the book, pulls an old dartboard from behind the couch, and tacks the picture on. Kelsey clears the wall of our mementos, my fun cross stitches and even the picture of my dream shoes, Louboutin Solibria pumps in starshine pink.
“You got me a game of darts.”
“On Max Hilton’s face,” she says, handing me the darts, which Kelsey has finally liberated.
“You shouldn’t have,” I say.
“Go, go, go!” Kelsey claps. “Dart therapy!” Her pretty dimples are in full flare.
I feel a little weird about it, but I throw. I get his cheek. My galpals clap. My next hits the board, wide of the picture. I still get applause. “I don’t know, you guys.”
I sink back down onto the couch. My friends take their turns, then it’s time for more beer. We leave the darts on his face. It was a sweet thought.
“It’s a good look on him,” Kelsey says.
“Doomed to serve my nemesis every day of my life for the foreseeable future,” I say. “Isn’t that one of the punishments they give Greek gods? I would honestly rather roll a boulder up a mountain or have birds tear at my flesh.”
“It really is as if he wants to punish you,” Kelsey muses. “And he’s found the most stunningly effective way to do it.”
“If you’re trying to cheer me up, it’s not working.”
Kelsey snorts and picks up Max’s book. “Over a million copies sold,” she reads. “A million suckers.” She starts flipping through. “Newsflash, losers: Max Hilton picks up girls because he looks like Max Hilton. Not because he has some golden rules.”
“I was thinking,” Lizzie says, “if you were truly insignificant to him, why would he bother making you deliver sandwiches? What if he needs you to do the delivery because you’re not insignificant?”
Such a weird idea. My chest buzzes with the strangeness of it.
“You never know,” she says.
“Spoken by a woman newly in love.” Lizzie is enjoying living with her man now. And she owns her own cookie bakery, so to say that she’s seeing the bright side of things is an understatement. She’s looking through a kaleidoscope of hearts and sugar frosting.
Kelsey’s unusually quiet. Her nose is buried in the book.
Lizzie informs me that today is National Square Dance Day. She describes how hard it was to make a cookie to commemorate that. Her cookie bakery specializes in cookies that are frosted to ironically commemorate holidays. “I ended up doing a woman with a really big skirt. I thought about an accordion, because chocolate—”
“Wait one minute,” Kelsey says. “No. No freaking way.”
“What?” I ask.
Her jaw is set hard. “Nathan used one of these pickup techniques on me. He worked Max’s system on me, and I fell for it.”
Lizzie’s eyes widen. She knows all about Kelsey’s cheating ex.
“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” I try.
“You were there! It was last fall at the Chiron Club. Remember how he wore the hat? And he told the funny, sweet story about the strange dog that got in his house?”
I sit up, not liking this. “The dog story was fake? It’s the only thing I liked about him.”
“It’s a script from this book! There are all these scripts of funny stories for men to tell in the back.”